Educational Strategies for Elem Students (Understood.org)
Sand Writing
Word Building
Sand Writing
Sand writing can engage sight, touch, and sound to connect letters and their sounds. Place a handful of sand on a cooking tray. Using their finger the student writes a word.
Air Writing
Word Building
Sand Writing
Air writing reinforces the sound each letter makes through muscle memory. It can also reinforce commonly confused letter forms like 'b' and 'd'.
Story Sticks
Word Building
Word Building
Story sticks can help kids who struggle with reading comprehension visualize the elements of a story. Use a different color craft stick to represent each element, such as "characters" or "setting". XZX
Word Building
Word Building
Word Building
Kids can build words with tiles or magnetic letters. Kids can also use magnetic letters that have vowels in one color and consonants in another. They should sound it out as they lay them down.
Tapping out sounds
Tapping out sounds
Tapping out sounds
Tapping gives kids a way to feel and hear how sounds are segmented and blended to make words. Kids break down and blend word sounds by tapping out each sound with their fingers and thumb.
Shared Reading
Tapping out sounds
Tapping out sounds
In shared reading, kids join in or share the reading of a book with an educator. They follow along as you read aloud or while they listen to an audio version of the book. It can be interactive by underlining sight words and writing notes.
Accommodations
A Word from National Library of Medicine..W
According to the academic article "Understanding Mental Health in Developmental Dyslexia: A Scoping Review", there is evidence from that children with dyslexia experience a different trajectory of socio-emotional difficulties during the school years than those with other special educational needs. Internalizing symptoms, specifically anxiety have been highlighted as a particular mental health concern among children with dyslexia. ( Wilmot, Adrienne, et al. “Understanding Mental Health in Developmental Dyslexia: A Scoping Review.” Nih.Gov, 2023, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9864451/. )
Emotional Regulation
The article states that emotion regulation in the context of dyslexia has not been comprehensively explored, and represents a gap in the literature given that emotion regulation is strongly associated with mental health across the lifespan and may be hindered in children who experience language/literacy difficulty in early childhood. There is evidence from the research that children with dyslexia, relative to controls, have more difficulty with recognizing emotions in others (from facial and vocal cues). It may suggest difficulty with understanding their own emotions.
Academic Factors
Children's attitude to their learning and whether they succeed I their studies despite their learning challenges has been linked to their mental health. Children with SLD who believed that their teacher understood and supported their learning disability reported significantly lower levels of anxiety, highlighting the importance not only of having the parents who understand dyslexia, but also having the academic support. Students with dyslexia and other learning difficulties may be at low levels of school connectedness, a concept that describes perceptions of being understood, supported, and treated fairly at school by peers and teachers alike.